Hacker News Reader

Comment by pflats | Hacker News Reader

According to the article, 7% of Finnish children don't graduate high school, compared to 25% of US children.

22% of US children live in poverty. 4% of Finnish children live in poverty.[1]

Strange.

Furthermore, it's my personal policy that anyone who creates an infographic with a bar graph that starts at 520 and goes up to 570 should be ignored. Either they are trying to intentionally skew interpretation of the data by presenting it in a misleading fashion, or they don't know enough about mathematics to understand why their graph is misleading. Neither one presents a reliable source.

[1]http://www.nationmaster.com/compare/Finland/United-States/Ec...

View on HN

Yes, Finland is a great country to live in. Also Sweden, Norway and Denmark. But people start loosing interest the moment you mention taxation.

This things don't come cheap and in the US is hard to sell the idea of "high taxes = better quality of life".

Some of my colleagues at Microsoft have worked in Denmark and they all complain about the taxation there and consider it unacceptable. I honestly can't understand that. I'd rather give half my salary in taxes to the government and get free education, healthcare and whatnot. My wife and I definitely don't aspire to be rich, as long as we're comfortable we're ok, so maybe that's our difference.

What I don't get is how people in the US pay 25% income tax and don't get outraged for getting almost nothing back. Heck, we just put our daughter in public school, and even though it's a public school we have to pay $360 a month for full Kindergarten, otherwise she can only attend 2 hours a day. Besides that, the school has to promote fundraisers to cover their costs, because apparently the only thing the state pays for is teachers' salaries. At least 911 is free.

To me it feels like all taxes I pay in the US are mostly just for funding wars :( Even in a shitty country like Brazil you get free education (up to grad school - and state universities are the best in the country), free healthcare and a state pension when you retire. Sure, it all sucks one way or another [1], not because there's not enough money but because politicians down there are extremely corrupt - fix the corruption and you get a tremendous quality of life with a 27,5% income tax.

[1] Public healthcare varies from place to place - where I lived (Porto Alegre, RS) it was ok, but in poorer places they don't have a lot of necessary equipment and are understaffed. Although state universities have a lot of research funding and the best professors, the facilities are quite poor. And the state pension is very low, but that could be fixed by fixing the high level of corruption we have first.

Well, first let me say that the US health care system seems like the worst one in the Western world. We skip comparing with that.

[Edit: In Scandinavia] If you pay taxes for health care etc -- then someone else decides the priorities. This is potentially very bad for you. After paying taxes, you won't have enough money/insurance to go do expensive treatments in other places.

(Edit: Let me put it like this. Health care is centrally planned. Consider the size of that system per million people and realize it is very, very hard to make it work.)

My standard example, from me and others I know:

Sweden (and probably Finland) are internationally acknowledged to be bad at catching health problems. Doctors have lots of administration and just don't have enough time to do diagnosis for individual patients.

The worst part is that the doctors will tell you something, anything, to get you out of their hair.

(Anecdotally, Swedish doctors take jobs in Norway partly to get a chance to do their d-mn job.)

Me and others I know have had decades with e.g. losing your favorite sports (easily treated knee problems), tiredness (undiagnosed food allergies with few symptoms, lack of X, etc). And so on.

I have no idea if 0.5% or 10% of the population get their life quality seriously lowered by this. And no one else know either, since that question just isn't examined...

I had never considered that "who sets the priorities" angle. Thanks for pointing that out :) I just wish healthcare in the US wasn't so ridiculously expensive.

In the USA that's a hard sell because many voters have never observed it to be the case. While many people consider relatively highly-taxed California, New York, etc. to be the best the USA has to offer, many others consider them social, governmental, and political disasters. That's why they're all moving to Colorado! (seems like it anyway...)

I haven't lived in Scandinavia, but my observations of other parts of the world lead me to suspect that politicians and bureaucrats in that blessed region are simply less corrupt and inept than those in the USA. Given more resources, they deliver more benefits. In the same situation, their American counterparts just inspire more outrage.

No, I don't have a solution for these depressing observations.

>Furthermore, it's my personal policy that anyone who creates an infographic with a bar graph that starts at 520 and goes up to 570 should be ignored.

I strongly disagree. It's misleading to shift the bottom of the graph some, because it still looks like an unshifted graph. But if you shift the bottom of the graph all the way up to the lowest value, it does not look at all like an unshifted graph, and should not mislead anyone. Finnish children are obviously not getting scores 20 times higher than other countries.

Eyeballing the graph, if Finland has a 563 and Lichtenstein a 522, that's 7.9% higher.

The point of a graph is to convey information in a concise and useful manner. The pencil graph does no such thing; it obfuscates. It's objectively worse than giving the reader the actual numbers.

edit: That said, for any standardized tests, the scores generally don't follow a linear pattern. (From what I understand, they usually follow a normal distribution.) I don't know enough about PISA to even say what a 563 means, and neither does the vast majority of this thing's audience. Without more detail, even that 7.9% isn't helpful.

The source seems to be http://www.kidsinnscience.eu/upload/file/Pisa_2006.pdf where on page 22 it shows that the lowest scoring country, Kyrgyzstan, scored 322. What's more, these numbers are for Science only which is not mentioned in the infographic. I agree it's very misleading.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com